- I’m going to try writing a few weeknotes to see how they feel. I need some way to consolidate everything I’m reading and thinking about, but longer blog posts are not coming together. These weeknotes will help me track my technical interests – and hopefully help me find interesting blog posts when I need to refer back to them.
- Last Sunday, I had an interesting conversation with Laurence where I found myself asking whether agile is too hard for most teams. Laurence pointed out out that the core of agile is simple, but it does place a lot of demand on developers. I think the widely perceived failures of agile need much more consideration.
- In another discussion with Laurence, I realised how vital GenAI skills will be for technical managers – there is a huge change in software development coming and staying current will require understanding those skills – not least to be able to support and unblock those who use them most.
- Something I’ve not blogged about over the past few weeks is the decline of stack overflow. It’s been interesting to see how the references for learning technical skills have changed over the years.
- One of the things I like most about working in a large consultancy is the number of talks and activities going on. An ‘unadvent of code’ group has started to look at the Advent of Code puzzles from 2018. This has got me playing with Go as a coding activity, which I’m enjoying.
Links
- I watched the video Java for AI by Java Library Architect Paul Sandoz – another example of the Java platform’s strength as a combination of JVM, libraries. It’s will be good to see Java become a first-class platform for AI
- AI Is Poised to Re-write History is an interesting article looking at GenAI as a reading machine rather than a writing machine. It also interviews Mark Humphries, who was discussed in the excellent Feb 2024 Verge article How AI can make history
Reading
Writing for Developers
I started reading this book, a recommendation from my colleague Matt. The book could probably be titled ‘Blogging for Developers’, and it’s interesting to see someone writing such a book in 2025. I like the book, but I definitely have philosophical differences with it, in that it focusses on blogging as a way to go viral, sometimes neglecting the more personal uses of blogging (such as weeknotes). A good counterpoint occurs in Simon Willison’s piece on keeping a link blog.